I manage a retail store for a living. Most nights I end up picking away at code, either on my home server or on the browser games I make with a friend.
Now Keeping Starforge Pets running through its first weeks open to everyone.
A browser game about collecting and breeding dragons. My co-developer and I met years ago on an old virtual pet site, and Drakkins was her idea. We'd bring it up every so often, and a few months ago she reached out about it again and this time we built it. It's in closed alpha now with over 500 dragons hatched, and we're waiting on new art before we push much further.
Our second game, built on the same Django base as Drakkins. You raise companions from six species and send them on expeditions across a star map to bring back resources. It's the one we've been pushing lately.
I built and look after the website for my mom's dog training business. Her old WordPress site was clunky and looked dated, and WordPress was a lot of overhead and security worry for a small site. I rebuilt it as plain HTML and CSS on my own server and wrote the contact form myself. I also found two duplicate Google listings splitting her reviews and asked Google to merge them. She liked it right away and has been helping me get it just how she wants it.
I wanted an old Android phone to show my homelab dashboard all day without babysitting it. The kiosk apps I found locked the features I wanted behind a purchase, so I wrote my own. It keeps the page full screen and reloads it when the Wi-Fi drops or the page freezes. It can black out the screen overnight, and Home Assistant can control it over a small HTTP API. It's free and open source, with signed APKs on GitHub.
A high-maintenance virtual pet rock. Every pet gets you a line from Gary, usually a rock pun.
Smaller things I built for fun, or because I needed them.
A browser game about running a guild hall for dogs. You adopt real breeds, send them on timed expeditions that keep going while you're away, and take on bosses like the Squirrel King. I can't draw at all, so everything is built from free pixel art packs. It works on phones and desktops, and your save stays in your browser.
Play it →A scraper that saved about 53,000 posts from an old message board before they disappeared, plus a small PHP site for searching and reading through them. It's private for now.
Open the archive (password needed) →Generates six trippy images at a time with ImageMagick. Click one to reroll it, or download the ones you like. I built it partly to learn ImageMagick and partly because I wanted the images.
Try it →A userscript for an old pet game I still play, replacing four smaller ones I'd been using. It shows which wishlist items you already own and adds chat search and image previews, plus some smaller page tools. It never clicks anything in the game for you.
Install it →Two small language models I run myself, one on an old OnePlus 6T and one on my home server, talking to each other about a subject I pick. I wanted to see what happens when they do. The conversations get saved to a page you can read through, and lately they've been playing Zork too.
Watches a streamer's channel and pings Discord when they go live. While the stream is on it logs gifts and posts running summaries, and there's a small local dashboard for checking on it.
A web app for copying movies and shows from my media library onto a USB drive. Plug in a drive and pick what fits, and it copies over with a live progress bar. I made it so friends and family could take something home to watch without setting up streaming.
I'm not a developer by trade. Years ago I played an MMO called Shaiya, and someone told me people ran their own private servers for it. I thought the code side of that was interesting, so I learned to build my own server, with a website, a shop and a pile of scripts to go with it. I've been at it ever since. When I'm not, I'm probably playing Satisfactory or Old School RuneScape, or staring at a browser trying to figure out what to even do.